Excerpt from The Dead Hand: A Brief Sketch of the Relations Between Church and State, With Regard to Ecclesiastical Property and the Religious Orders This various legislation to a common end throughout the lands of the Roman Obedience is of interest rather as showing the unani mous conviction of European statesmen during five or six centuries as to the evils of accumulation in mortmain than as exhibiting their power to curb the acquisitiveness of the Church. The constant iteration of legislation demonstrates its ineffectiveness. By one means or another the Church baffled the law - givers, heedless of the temptations which it was offering and of the risk which it might run whenever circumstances should weaken its awful authority over the minds of princes and peoples. It did not anticipate that the time would come when those who might shrink from spoliation would reconcile their consciences to the euphemism of secularization.' Yet there was a wholesome warning in the Reformation when it narrowly escaped much greater losses than those which it suffered. The Violent measures of Henry VIII. And his Court of Augmenta tions, and the progressive absorptions by the Protestant princes of Germany are foreign to our subject, for they were the work of schismatics and heretics. More to the purpose is the fact that some of the Catholic princes were scarcely more scrupulous than the Lutherans in seizing the property of the religious Orders, and that in the Reichstag of Augsburg, in 1524, it was seriously proposed by both parties to secularize the whole church property of Germany. The prelates were to receive a fitting income; the noble canons were to be paid as heretofore until they died off without successors one or two nunneries were to be maintained in each circle of the empire as retreats for noble ladies; priests and preachers were to be decently supported, and the rest of the revenues was to be devoted to public uses, especially to the maintenance of a standing army for the defence of the empire. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.